Electronic voting for the upcoming presidential election has already started …

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Electronic voting for the upcoming presidential election has already started in some areas, and the news from some Florida sites doesn't look good. It's not even so much that touch-screen machines are having problems, but that computer glitches of all types abound.

Gisela Salas, of the Broward Elections Office, said workers had problems connecting with a live database that is used to verify that a voter is properly registered in the county... All 14 of the branch offices had problems with the database connection. Many of the sites had numerous voters lined up to cast their ballots. Some reported waiting in lines up to 2-1/2 hours to vote... Salas said it was not yet known what went wrong to cause the glitch...

In Palm Beach County, the center of the madness during the 2000 presidential recount, a state legislator said she wasn't given a complete absentee ballot when she asked not to use the electronic touch-screen machines. In Orange County, the computer system that lists voters briefly crashed, paralyzing voting in Orlando and its immediate suburbs. And in Broward County several sites had problems with laptops connected to elections headquarters...

In Orange County, the computers went down for about 10 minutes shortly after voting began, said Margaret Dunn, the senior deputy elections supervisor. She said she did not know what caused the problem, but speculated a faulty Internet connection may have been to blame...

In addition to these types of glitches, there are also serious allegations of voter registration fraud going around right now. If anyone had any doubts that the legitimacy of this election will be disputed, those can now be definitively put to rest: this election is already being disputed, and it hasn't even taken place. The only question is to what degree it'll be disputed, and that can only be determined by the closeness of the race.

On a related note, I'm absolutely not trying to stir up "conspiracy theories" or anything of the sort, but I do feel obligated to note that the Florida Republican Party, despite public protestations from Jeb Bush that there's nothing wrong with touch-screen voting, sent out a flier to state Republicans urging them to vote using absentee paper ballots in order to make sure their vote is really counted (here and here). My point is that even those in charge of implementing the system don't really seem to trust it. Again, the days following Nov. 2 could make the 2001 election dispute look relatively minor.